How to play Voidcharter

Voidcharter is a free space game you play by typing. You never leave the starbase. You command the ship HCV Halcyon Grace by typing orders at a terminal, and the ship's shipmind, ELIZA, carries them out. She will call you Dave whatever you tell her. Nothing to download, no account, and it works on a phone.

Open the game and keep this page beside it.

The first five minutes

Type LAUNCH. ELIZA starts the reactor, asks the station for clearance, releases the moorings and takes you out. If you would rather do the steps yourself (START REACTOR, REQUEST CLEARANCE, RELEASE MOORINGS), they still work, and LAUNCH fills in whatever you skipped.
Type SYSTEM to see the chart of bodies in your home system.
Type NAVIGATE and a body's name to fly there. Trips cost fuel and take time, and a better reactor and a better navigator both help.
In orbit, type SCAN. It tells you roughly what is down there, and how much it tells you depends on your scanners and your science officer.
Type LAND to see the landing sites, then LAND and a site name to go down.
On the ground, SCAN again to find signals, then MINE and a signal's letter. ELIZA will ask who to send, and only that crew member is at risk. Some signals are false leads.
Lift off with LAUNCH, fly home with DOCK, then SELL what is in the hold.

Commands

STATUS: Where you are and how the ship stands.
HELP: Only the orders that make sense right now, and you can tap them.
SYSTEM: The chart of the home system.
NAVIGATE <body>: Fly to a body.
SCAN: Read a body from orbit, or search a site for deposits once you have landed.
LAND, LAND <site>: List the sites, or go down to one.
MINE <letter>, MINE ALL, STOP: Send a crew member after one signal, work through every signal, or call them back.
CARGO: What is in the hold, including fuel.
JETTISON: Dump cargo or fuel overboard to shed weight.
DOCK, SELL, BUY, REFUEL: Trade at the station and top up the tank.
CREW, SHIP: Your crew roster and your ship's systems.
ASSIGN, REASSIGN: Choose who goes out mining, or move a crew member to another station.
REPAIR: Patch the hull or an injured crew member.
UPGRADE <system>: Try to raise a ship system for credits, at the station. Attempts can fail, you pay either way, and the higher a system is the more often it fails. Raise the reactor first, because the others can't outrun it.
PRINT <station>, TRAIN <station>: Fabricate a bot for an empty station (at the home station only), or try to level one up. Both cost fuel, TRAIN costs credits too, and TRAIN can fail.
RISK <level>: How hard to push mining. Bigger hauls, worth more and faster, but more likely to hurt someone.
BUTTONS ON, BUTTONS OFF: Show or hide tappable buttons above the keyboard.

You don't have to type the exact words. ELIZA copes with typos and plain phrasing, and if she can't follow you she says so and points you at HELP.

Things worth knowing

Fuel is your only spendable resource besides credits. Every trip, every new bot, every training session and every repair draws from the same tank, so don't fly home on fumes and expect to print a replacement.
Weight costs fuel and time. A heavy hold makes landing, launching and lifting off cost more fuel, and there is a limit to what your ship can lift. JETTISON is the way out when you are too heavy.
Some minerals are unstable. SCAN and CARGO mark them. Carrying one can damage the hull every time you travel, land or lift off. Sell them quickly, and keep the hull repaired.
Your crew are printed bots, not people. A bot can be hurt or lost, and a replacement costs fuel. REPAIR heals the injured. When you send someone mining, ELIZA warns you first.
Crew levels matter. The science officer decides how well you read a scan, the navigator how quickly you travel, whoever you send mining how much you haul, and the engineer how often a run goes wrong.
The galaxy is shared. Every player draws on the same mineral supplies and the same station stock. What another captain mines is gone for you too, and what they sell is there for you to buy. You never see them.
Your game is saved in your browser. You can close the tab and come back to it. RESTART wipes it.

Why I made it

Voidcharter is inspired by Starflight, with one twist: you never leave the starbase, and you run everything by typing. It is a personal project and it keeps changing. If something confuses you or breaks, tell me, because that is how the game gets better.